Interests:

My work on syntactic theory and on language acquisition focuses on emergentism—the idea that the complex systems are best understood by investigating the interaction of more basic forces and propensities. In the case of language, these factors seem to consist largely of processing pressures, which play a key role in shaping the properties of grammatical systems, the manner in which those properties emerge in the course of development and are lost in case of impairment, and the way in which they are distributed cross-linguistically. Syntactic Carpentry (published in 2005 by Erlbaum) provides a detailed outline of this idea as it related to syntax, illustrating how many core grammatical phenomena can be traced to the operation of an efficiency-driven processor whose primary goal is simply to reduce the burden on working memory. This theme is pursued and refined in several of the papers that can be downloaded from this site. The Handbook of Language Emergence (Erlbaum, 2015),co-edited with Brian MacWhinney, offers a broader perspective on emergentist work in cognitive science in general.

My research on Korean is relatively wide-ranging, beginning with Categories and Case (1989). I maintain an ongoing interest in case-related phenomena as well as processing and acquisition, and I have co-authored a bilingual ‘root dictionary’ of Korean (The Handbook of Korean Vocabulary, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996) as well as a book on Korean phonology (The Sounds of Korean, University of Hawaii Press, 2003). I am currently completing a book on Jejueo, the language of Korea’s Jeju Island (co-authored with Changyong Yang and Sejung Yang).

Finally, I have a strong interest in the acquisition and maintenance of ‘heritage languages’—a broad category that includes both the family languages of immigrants to America (e.g., Korean) and endangered indigenous languages around the world. I am particularly devoted to the preservation and revitalization of Jejueo.

I am happy to discuss any of these matters with groups and classes via Skype.

Publications (books)

Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island. (co-authored with Changyong Yang & Sejung Yang). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. To appear in 2017.

How Children Learn Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction(co-edited with J. Archibald). Eighth edition. Toronto: Pearson-Longman, 2016. (The U.S. edition of this book, co-edited with J. Archibald, M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller and entitledContemporary Linguistics, is published by St. Martin’s Press.)

The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide(co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.

Studies on Korean in Community Schools (co-edited with D.-J. Lee, S. Cho, M. Lee, & M. Song). Technical Report 22. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, 2000. (This is a collection of reports, written in Korean by my then students, summarizing our research on ‘heritage learners’ of Korean in the United States.)

Syntactic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Handbook of Korean Vocabulary(co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.

Principles of Grammar and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Papers available for downloading as PDF files.

If you’ve come here to find out about emergentism or emergentist approaches to language, the following papers, which were written for a general audience, may be helpful:

‘Emergentism.‘ This brief overview of emergentism appeared in 2010 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Hogan (pp. 274-76). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

‘The emergentist program.’ This selective survey of emergentist research on language appeared in 2008 in Lingua 118 (pp. 447-64), a special issue edited by Roger Hawkins and devoted to an examination of emergentist and UG-based work on language acquisition.

‘An emergentist approach to syntax.’ This paper, first written in early 2001, summarizes many of the points developed in more detail in my 2005 book, Syntactic Carpentry (Erlbaum). The paper was subsequently revised and updated for publication in 2010, appearing in The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (pp. 257-83), edited by H. Narrog & B. Heine and published by Oxford University Press. It is somewhat more technical than the two preceding items, but considers a broader range of issues.

‘Does emergentism have a chance?‘ This is my plenary talk to the 32nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (November 2007) as it appeared in the Proceedings. It focuses almost entirely on the problem of first language acquisition.

‘Interview on emergentism.’ This interview, conducted by Mei Yang of South China University of Technology, appeared in Chinese in The Foreign Modern Language Quarterly, 32.4, 121-28 in 2009.

Other papers (those preceded by a double asterisk have a specifically emergentist focus):

**‘Anaphora and the case for emergentism.’ This chapter, which appeared in the Handbook of Language Emergence (co-edited by Brian MacWhinney; published by Wiley in early 2015) presents an emergentist analysis of several core properties of anaphora.

**‘Processing determinism.’ This paper, which appeared in Language Learning 65 in early 2015, outlines an emergentist, processing-based approach to understanding linguistic development.

‘The price of politeness: Subject honorification and processing.’ This chapter, which appeared in Studies in Korean Linguistics and Language Pedagogy (co-edited by S.-O. Sohn, S. Cho & S-H. You and published by Korea University Press in 2013) discusses the role of processing in explaining certain contrasts in the Korean system of honorification.

**‘The illusion of language acquisition.’ This keynote article (Approaches to Bilingualism 3, 253-85, 2013) outlines a processing-based theory of language acquisition built around the idea that development is best understood as a side-effect of the processor’s attempts to improve its own functioning.

**‘Three factors in the design and acquisition of language.’ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 3, 493-99. This paper, published in 2012, discusses recent developments in minimalism and their relationship to the emergentist thesis for language, with special attention to the notions of computational efficiency and processing cost.

‘A psycholinguistic tool for the assessment of language loss’ (with A. Schafer, J. Perla, O.-S. Lee, & J. Weiting). This paper outlines a simple response-time tool for assessing language strength in bilinguals, with a view to diagnosing the potential for language loss both in individuals and in communities. It appeared in 2009 in Language Documentation and Conservation 3, 100-12 and can be downloaded at HALA (see above link).

**‘Language without grammar.’ This is the revised version of my plenary talk to the 2003 annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. It appeared in the Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 139-67), edited by N. Ellis & P. Robinson and published by Routledge in 2008.

**‘The syntax of quantification in SLA: An emergentist approach.’ This is my plenary talk to the 2006 GASLA conference; it can be downloaded at the above link. It also appears in Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference,, ed. by M. O’Brien, C. Shea, & J. Archibald. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2007, 98-113.’

Papers specifically on Korean:

‘Rethinking structure and case.‘ This is the text of my 2004 talk to the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of Korea; it is virtually identical to the version that appears in the conference proceedings.

‘Words and Sounds.‘ This invited talk to the International Association for the Promotion of Korean as an International Language (2001) discusses two books that I co-authored that are of special interest to Korean language professionals.